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Amazon means business: Fresh off of the launch of a new mobile loading service for prepaid accounts in the U.S., Amazon is launching a new marketplace for businesses in the U.K. Finextra reports Visa and a network of U.K. banks including Barclaycard, Citi, HSBC and Lloyds Bank UK are powering Amazon Business in the U.K., which will sell more than a hundred million products, including laptops, office supplies, furniture and printers. Visa will provide expense management for corporate card holders who migrate their procurement to the new Amazon service. Amazon Business users also get price breaks, invoicing, tracking and general corporate purchase services such as multi-user accounts and spending limits. Amazon Business launched in the U.S. in 2015 and serves more than 400,000 businesses and generated $1 billion in sales in 2016. It debuted in Germany in December 2016 and has more than 50,000 business customers.
A student is reflected in the window of an Amazon.com Inc. kiosk on the University of California, Berkeley campus in Berkeley, California, U.S., on Wednesday, Oct. 12, 2016. By the end of the year, Amazon will have staffed pickup kiosks serving more than 500,000 college students at 16 schools around the country. Students order items from Amazon.com Inc. and retrieve them from new pickup lockers. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
Turkey's 'Stripe' a winner with VCs: E-commerce toolkit Iyzico has closed a $15 million funding round, a nod to the popularity of open development tools and a strengthening Turkish e-commerce market. TechCrunch reports The London-based Amadeus Capital partners, Vostok Emerging Finance, International Finance Corporation and VC 212, an Istanbul-based investor, participated in the funding round. Referred to as the "Stripe of Turkey" locally. Like Stripe, Iyzico enables mostly smaller merchants to set up digital payment interfaces. The four year old company, which sells 24-hour onboarding and PCI compliance among its features, reports it has 10,000 merchants among its clients and has 200,000 sellers using the technology to sell through online marketplaces. The U.S.-based Stripe has also done well with investors, more than doubling its valuation in the past year and landing its founders on Forbes' billionaires list.
Wex gets in on Singapore rush: Singapore has become a hotbed of new payments innovation, and corporate payment company Wex is expanding its range of products in the Asian market. Wex announced it will offer a single-use virtual card in Singapore for corporate payments, including unique card numbers and virtual controls for security. Wex's payment products include fleet cards, travel cards and procurement services. "Singapore is an important market for us and coupled with the fact that it is a global financial centre, this endorsement marks our commitment to the region," said Jim Pratt, senior vice president and general manager for virtual payments at Wex.
Attack on ATM: What better way to promote an anime series than a themed ATM? The customized cash machine, based on the series Attack on Titan, will operate at Seven Bank in Tokyo's Nakano Broadway through the end of June, according to a Kotaku summary of a translated news report. ATM-based marketing stunts are not unheard of even in North America, where TD Bank created a modified ATM that could dispense gifts such as flowers or airline tickets; video of customers using the ATM became a viral hit on YouTube. With the Attack on Titan ATM, taking a flash photo of the decoration reveals one of the series' monstrous titans, though Kotaku questioned the wisdom of encouraging people to take photos in the vicinity of an ATM.
Feds order Wells Fargo to rehire whistleblower and pay him $5.4 million Los Angeles Times Wells Fargo & Co. has been ordered to rehire a former Los Angeles-area bank manager who federal officials say was fired because he reported potential fraud to his superiors and to a bank ethics hotline — a claim the bank denies even...
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